We’re excited that starting this year we are offering a free tier of Fairwinds Insights, our Kubernetes governance software. Many organizations are just getting started with K8s, while others are beginning to scale up their use of Kubernetes, and some are already fairly mature in their Kube adoption. When you’re just starting out, you are still learning how to make sure that cloud native and Kubernetes adoption is helping you meet your business and technical objectives. At the same time, you want to make sure that your clusters are set up to meet the demands of your development workloads without putting your organization at risk or wasting cloud resources.
It’s important to put Kubernetes guardrails in place to ensure that developers can ship cloud native applications faster without worrying about making mistakes related to security, resource utilization, and reliability. The free tier of Insights is perfect for teams that are just starting out, as well as small teams and individual users.
Insights is a SaaS platform that’s easy to use. The free tier is a fully functioning version of the Fairwinds Insights software, providing visibility and control for environments up to 20 nodes, two clusters, and one repo. This tier also includes access for an unlimited number of users and 30 days of cost metrics retention.
Every Insights user can connect existing Fairwinds open source tools to the free tier seamlessly, including:
Polaris, an open source policy engine for Kubernetes that validates and remediates Kubernetes resources to make sure that you are following configuration best practices
Nova, an open source project that finds outdated or deprecated Helm charts running in your cluster, as well as out of date container images
Pluto, an open source utility that helps users find deprecated Kubernetes apiVersions in their code repositories and Helm releases
Users can also activate features such as Infrastructure-as-Code scanning, automated ticketing, and container cost allocation within just a few minutes of signing up for the free account. The free tier includes all of the features in the Fairwinds Insights platform, so all users can make the most of the platform and begin putting guardrails in place around security, cost, and compliance in their Kubernetes environments.
These guardrails are part of our Kubernetes governance platform which helps platform engineering teams manage the complexity associated with multi-tenant clusters. Using Fairwinds Insights, platform engineers can apply these guardrails at every stage of the development process. The free tier empowers platform engineers to easily automate best practices and develop a culture of service ownership and cost avoidance. The new tiered pricing of Insights allows them to do all of this at pricing levels that make sense for their organization — and without slowing down app teams.
Fairwinds continues to contribute projects and code to the open source community and integrates its Insights platform with other open source tools to provide the best possible experience for users. Building tools based on experience with maintaining and optimizing Kubernetes environments is an essential part of Fairwinds’ identity as a company.
Offering a free tier of Fairwinds Insights to the cloud native community is a natural progression for us, because we have been in the trenches building tools and offering services to help organizations adopt cloud native technologies and Kubernetes since we were founded in 2015. Today, those organizations (and many more) are growing and need to be able to ensure that they have visibility into their Kubernetes clusters and automatically ensure that they are deployed consistently.
“It’s important to the entire cloud native community that we help companies operationalize best of breed open source technology in a way that consistently applies Kubernetes best practices and enables service ownership,” said Bill Ledingham, CEO, Fairwinds. “By making a free tier available, teams can benefit from the extensive functionality of Fairwinds Insights as they move forward on their Kubernetes journey.”
Try out Fairwinds Insights today - sign up here and pick the free version. It’s ideal for very small teams and individual users, but you can also use it to get your feet wet and see how the software looks, even if your organization is much larger. You don’t need to enter a credit card to get started, so there’s no need to remember to come back and cancel your subscription. If you exceed the limits of the free tier but want to keep using it, check out the Team level, which is awesome for single product teams and medium-sized organizations.
Once you sign up, you’ll be guided through the simple installation process. You can set up the Slack integration and create your first Kubernetes governance policy right away to see how it all works. We also have a Fairwinds Community Slack group where you can ask questions and get answers from our team and the community alike. We look forward to having you join the community and helping the cloud native community grow together.
